The current economic climate and governmental pressures to reduce energy demands and greenhouse gas emission will force manufacturers to explore energy reductions on the plant floor. Conventionally, basic monitoring of energy is performed only at the facility level. Understanding energy usage patterns is accomplished by manually reviewing the logged data for obvious discrepancies or trends in consumption. These manual analysis processes are extremely labor intensive and require human approximations and interpolations. Accordingly, accuracy is not easily achieved, if at all. Rather, these calculations and approximations are prone to error and thus, oftentimes result in meaningless data.
The current demand management systems are nothing more than infrastructure maximum capacity load shedding applications. Newer systems may include the ability to transfer to on-site generation with auxiliary diesel or natural gas generators. Essentially, the facility level tracking of energy makes true demand management decisions impossible in today's industrial environment.